EIHS Lecture: Once Were Warriors: Colonial Mimesis, Martial Masculinity, and Imperial Nostalgia in Amazigh Morocco

Amazigh cultural-political activism in North Africa is premised on a rhetoric of resistance for territorial autonomy against imperial invaders from the Roman empire through the Islamic conquest and the French protectorate to contemporary Arab nationalist regimes. Yet, filtering through this dominant discourse are subaltern scripts that register nostalgia for particular pasts when, even under colonial tutelage, Amazigh groups felt recognized and effectively acted as self-determining agents of their own history making. In this paper, I draw on my research in southeastern Morocco to explore how Amazigh activists narrate the colonial past and memorialize martial masculine resistance and collaboration within it.

Paul A. Silverstein is professor of anthropology at Reed College. He is author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation (Indiana, 2004) and Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic (Pluto, 2018), and co-editor of Bourdieu in Algeria (Nebraska, 2009), among other publications. He has done extensive ethnographic and archival research on Amazigh cultural politics in southeastern Morocco. His translation of Moha Layid’s The Sacrifice of Black Cows—a Moroccan novel set during the nationalist uprising against French colonialism— was recently published by the MLA. He chairs the MERIP Board of Directors.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.